Experience Rate

[Albane]

Sorry if this is already listed somewhere, but I read the stickies and searched the PvP forums and found nothing definitive about the live experience rates.

I know the experience rate is currently 10x normal to allow for better testing, and I am guessing it will be dropped significantly for the games release.

What I would like to know is, what will the experience rate be on the release of November 18th? Will it be at least 2x, or will it be the classic rate?

While I can understand that many people feel the classic rate is fine, I really hope the rate is increased to at least 2x what classic was. My reasons for this are listed below, and come from experience playing MMORPGs since MUD days.

- Grinding 5 hours for 1 level does nothing for player skill. True skill comes at max level. 2 hours per level is plenty of a grind, especially considering it takes 4-5 levels between skill upgrades and there are still "Hell" levels.

- We have all gotten older and our RL responsibilities have increased since 1999. I am no longer a single college student whose only responsibility is to wake up at noon for a couple classes.

- This server is never going to be 1/4 as popular as the game was on release. We need to keep people playing as much as possible and we need to try and get new people to try this server out. A PvP server with a small population is not going to be much fun. In the end, a server with a 12 day played exp grind to reach level 50, will end up being 1 guild doing end game and no PvP competition.

- Sadly, we have all been exposed to games with content prior to end game. Whether it was a story line, quests, or dungeons worth grouping for. Everquest has nothing going for it from level 1-49. The gear is worthless, the quests are too rare and give worthless xp, and the storyline is non-existent. The only thing that sounds like fun is running around with friends and doing world PvP. Being forced to skip out on PvP so I can sit around killing Treants for another 20 hours to get my new spells, sounds like torture, not like a game.